We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.Find out moreJump to
Content

Michael Allen Fox

1. The many faces of home
Thinking about home
is a fundamental and universal concept, yet it has multiple associated and layered meanings for different people in a great range of circumstances. It inspires deep emotions and creative expressions that are both heartfelt and more intellectual. As a result, home surprises us by turning out to be a restless, shifting, somewhat elusive notion.

Michael Allen Fox

2. The importance of place
Place and the organization of life
Whatever else it might be, home is a place. This may be a spatial place or a place in the memory or imagination, or a place in all these senses plus more besides—such as an environment that is endowed with spiritual or symbolic significance. A ‘home place’ is also actively fashioned by those who inhabit it or are believed to, including human subjects and vitalizing forces (for example, ancestral or legendary presences). We must, therefore, when thinking about home, be prepared to stretch our concept of place in order

Michael Allen Fox

8. The future of home
Through a glass darkly
if humans have the good sense to protect their planet’s health, learn to live in peace with one another, and choose to share resources and opportunities more equitably. Only in this way will there be a future at all and one that is worth living in, unlike the apocalyptic versions presented by today’s film and fiction.

Michael Allen Fox

4. Remembering, imagining, and other mindwork
Reviving the past
petite madeleine , are delightfully described in the first volume of his monumental novel Remembrance of Things Past . And yet Proust, who wrote more about memory than perhaps any other novelist who ever lived, is the first to admit that acts of remembrance may not reveal what they appear to. So memory is elusive. Attempts to recall sometimes yield routine and completely expected results; but at other times a gain or loss in content or feeling is what we register instead.